Another fantastic day on a river in France.
Sans Peur
Grete & Fred Vithen
Wed 29 Oct 2014 19:16
| Max here……Fred keeps showing me maps and river and canal guides…….and I pretend to be interested…… but actually I don’t want to know……because I’m enjoying having no responsibility. I tell him “I’m on holidays!”, but Fred says “You’re not in Byron Bay now.” Too bad. I’m happy for Fred and Grete to make all the decisions. Today we spent the whole day with Elvis! As a leisure boat, we have to give priority to the commercial barges, so we have found the best way is to tuck in behind a friendly barge and ask permission to “lock” behind them. So as we set out this morning at about 7am, knowing we had to travel 68kms and negotiate 6 locks, along comes a French barge called “Elvis”. Fred and Grete speak about 6 languages between them, but they don’t have much French, so we had an interesting conversation with the (female) skipper of Elvis, and we think they were happy for us to tuck in behind them for the day. Anyway, we cruised along in their wake all day, and now we are safely moored up in an absolutely picturesque town called Compiegne, where Napoleon spent a lot of time during his reign. My first job was to find a supermarket and replenish our alcohol stocks. ( |